The
Philadelphia Music Season Opens with Two Sopranos
by Bernard Jacobson

Presumably
by coincidence, both the Kimmel Center’s own
classical series and the Philadelphia Orchestra
opened their 2004/05 seasons with programs
featuring famous sopranos. On 18 September
Kiri Te Kanawa gave a recital with pianist
Warren Jones; three evenings later, it was
the turn of Renée Fleming, who sang
Strauss’ Four Last Songs at the orchestra’s
gala Opening Night concert.

My previous
encounters with both singers not having been
of the happiest, I was fervently hoping to
be able to change my mind about one or both
of them, for I like liking things, and people,
much more than not liking them. My wife, who
enjoyed both performances, has sternly forbidden
me to "say anything bad"–but hell,
even domestic tranquility must be put at risk
when critical duty calls.

On the
first of these two evenings, it called in
tones far more stentorian than Dame Kiri’s
honeyed ones. There were indeed some beautiful
notes to be heard, but they tended to be isolated
phenomena, not much connected with other notes
or with the content–especially the poetic
content–of the songs and arias she offered,
which ranged from Handel and Vivaldi by way
of the French romantics to Puccini, Strauss,
and Wolf-Ferrari. The best performances came
in slow music like Fauré’s Après
un rêve, which was touchingly sung,
and particularly in her encore, presumably
a Maori folk-song, and certainly a quite lovely
tune.

Te Kanawa’s
manner of singing has often reminded me of
a fashion cartoon that appeared in Punch
many years ago, depicting a lady wearing a
dress that fell absolutely straight from shoulders
to floor: "Pretty face and leave the
rest vague," was the caption. Substitute
"voice" for "face" (not
that Dame Kiri is anything but good to look
at, I hasten to add), and you have a capsule
description of her method. The voice was always
beautiful, and it still is. But in fast music,
it sounds less well supported than of old,
so that we were left with a kind of sketch
of the melody, with every fourth or fifth
note properly placed, and the rest skated
over. "Fill in the blanks," was
what a singer of my acquaintance in the audience
remarked during intermission that we were
having to do. Nor did Mr. Jones’s excessive
deference and characterless piano-playing.

No less
important is the obvious circumstance that
this singer doesn’t love words. Macrocosmically,
viewed against the backdrop of the music world’s
celebrity industry, Dame Kiri is a star of
considerable magnitude. Microcosmically, looked
at in the context of what song is about, the
core of what she has always lacked could be
instanced in the first line of that superb
Strauss song, Morgen. The opening lines
of Mackay’s poem are "und morgen wird
die Sonne wieder scheinen" ("and
tomorrow the sun will shine again").
"Scheinen": a gorgeous word, rich
in potential radiance and color–yet for all
the trace of any of such qualities the singer
drew from it, she might just as well have
been singing about a cloud-obscured sunset,
not a day dawning with hope and felicity.

A lack
of expressive intensity has never been my
problem with Renée Fleming. On the
contrary, in music like Handel’s Alcina,
what sometimes troubles me is the sheer overload
of emotional vibrato with which she tends
to obscure both musical line and stylistic
aptness. I can hear the complaint, "You
critics are never satisfied." The point,
however, is surely that there has to be a
happy medium, an appropriate balance among
all the elements that go to make up song,
from the poet’s words and the composer’s understanding
of them to the musical language he speaks
and the stylistic background of his work.
Despite the dire judgments of those who would
have us believe that great singing is a thing
of the past, the world today is blessed with
an abundance of sopranos who achieve exactly
that across a wide range of repertoire: just
for starters, and in no particular order,
I could list Véronique Gens, Juliane
Banse, Sophie Daneman, Simone Kermes, Patrizia
Ciofi, Barbara Frittoli, Dominique Labelle,
Patricia Petibon, Natalie Dessay, and Deborah
Polaski. Well, in this performance of the
Four Last Songs I am glad to say that
Renée Fleming came closer to those
ideals than in anything I have heard from
her in the past.

Critical
duty, again, compels me to report that it
was not a flawless performance by any means.
Along with moments that proffered glimpses
of heaven, there were others rather more reminiscent
of that celebrated vocal oddity Florence Foster
Jenkins. The beauty was to be found almost
exclusively in the middle and lower reaches
of Ms. Fleming’s compass (so that the start
of Frühling had me at once hoping
for great things), whereas anything near the
top of the stave or above it revealed her
dangerously out of control. Quite aside from
fallible intonation, there was a troubling
hollowness to the high notes, and furthermore,
when she had to negotiate the passage from
high to low, she did it with an ungraceful
bump.

In these
supreme masterpieces of 20th-century song,
moreover, clear-eyed (and aptly titled) in
their confrontation with last things, I could
not help feeling that, by comparison with
performances I have heard by such singers
as Lisa della Casa, Lucia Popp, Evelyn Lear,
and Soile Isokoski, Ms. Fleming’s account
had something slightly self-regarding about
it. Nevertheless, this was a serious reading
of great music. It respected the line, and
it respected the significance of the lines.
The concluding "ist dies etwa der Tod?",
delivered cold, with any trace of vibrato
severely eschewed, rose notably to the occasion.

And
it was in any case a relief that it took place
at all, given that Opening Night had been
under threat from the parlous state of the
Philadelphia Orchestra’s negotiations for
a new contract. Three years ago, as it happens,
Ms. Fleming was scheduled to sing the Four
Last Songs with the orchestra, and had
to cancel owing to illness. It would have
been a sad irony if a strike had thwarted
her this time–but fortunately, with talks
going on down to the wire, an evident sense
of goodwill on both sides of the table caused
a one-month extension of the deadline, so
that Christoph Eschenbach’s second season
as music director could open as planned. Nor
could the players possibly have responded
more magnificently to the music on their stands.
Their support in the Strauss was sumptuous,
and an evening that began festively with the
Prelude to Act III of Lohengrin ended
even more impressively with Dvořák’s
Eighth Symphony. The strings in particular
sounded glorious, the great tune in the trio
of the third movement was shaped with characteristic
eloquence by principal oboist Richard Woodhams,
and altogether Eschenbach made something grander
and more substantial
than I have been accustomed to expect out
of what seems at first glance the least significant
of the composer’s late symphonies. I have
not previously heard the stertorous weak-beat
brass interjections at the big climax two-thirds
of the way through the first movement given
with such strength and point. The stunning
effect was another confirmation that, just
as a critic must never take past impressions
of a performer for portents of the future,
so he should never underestimate the most
innocent-seeming works of a master composer.

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